About

I’m Deborah J. Long, an artist based in South London.

My visual language grew out of graphic design - years spent working with colour, composition, and clarity - but over time that way of working began to feel too contained. I returned to painting as a more intuitive, bodily practice, where images could be felt as much as designed.

Alongside my art, I practise reflexology and have been studying tarot. I am just beginning my joureny on study of ancient, forgotten shamanic traditions. I work with healing tools including drums, rhythm, and ritual objects, and I’m interested in how sound, repetition, symbol, and image can shift inner states. These practices don’t sit separately from my art - they inform how and why I make it.

A turning point for me was encountering a traditional icon that had been given to friend. I was struck by its quiet power - how something so still could feel alive, protective, and deeply present. At the time, I didn’t have the language for why it affected me so strongly. Only later, through study and practice, did I begin to understand the power of images as carriers - of intention, memory, and meaning.

That understanding runs through everything I make now.

My artworks function as modern icons. They draw on tarot, ritual symbolism, pop art, feminism, humour, and repetition. Eyes, ladders, suns, markings, bodies, and gestures appear again and again - not to tell stories, but to hold space. These images are not illustrations; they are invitations.

I’m interested in the meeting point between the sacred and the everyday, strength and vulnerability, the body and the unseen. Breasts, faces, marks, and symbols appear unapologetically - not to provoke, but to normalise what has always been sacred.

Each piece is made slowly and deliberately. Whether it’s a print or orginal canvas, my hope is that the work becomes a quiet companion - something you live with, return to, or notice differently over time.

I believe images matter. They shape how we feel, remember, and heal